Miguel dreams of becoming a musician despite his family’s ban on music since Miguel's great-great-grandmother was abandoned with her little daughter Coco by her musician husband. On Día de los Muertos, he enters the Land of the Dead and meets Héctor, a charming skeleton who helps him search for his great-great-grandfather. Miguel uncovers a painful family secret and learns the importance of remembering loved ones. By returning home with a renewed understanding of his heritage, he helps heal his family’s past and keeps their memories alive.
As a bit of extra texture, the animation team used their proprietary tool Kingpin to add jiggle to the skeletons giving them a sense of looseness and life beyond rigid movements. Each skeleton had its own gait, posture, and rhythm, informed by their personal history and experiences. For example Hector had the peculiarities of limping and being able to split in half.
An automated tool that was utilized to animate a 'jiggle' to the bones to give them a sense of looseness. Kingpin allowed animators on Coco to control the skeletons’ movements with remarkable precision, adding secondary motion that responded naturally to each character’s actions.
It helped the computer automatically resolve issues like cloth bunching up around a skeleton's hand or snagging on a bony knee. Animators also digitally wrapped the skeletons' joints with super-stretchy invisible material, so that when the bones separated, the pants would touch that invisible barrier and not fall into the gaps.
